1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the field of e-commerce and in particular to communicating commercial information via electronic documents.
2. Background of the Invention
The present application is an improvement upon U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/466,627 referenced above.
In the field of e-commerce, there are many different players. Some of the players are large, and have used existing industrial electronic document specification languages for up to thirty years. These existing languages include Electronic Data Interchange (“EDI”) and Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce, and Transport (“EDIFACT”), both maintained by the Data Interchange Standard Association (“DISA”, http://www.disa.org), and the Intermediate Document (“IDOC”, http://www.sap.com). Some of the players are small and therefore could not participate in electronic commerce when only these older languages were available.
Now even the smallest entities can aspire to participate in electronic commerce. However, these smallest entities commonly use popular formats such as Extensible Markup Language (“XML”), while the larger entities continue to use the prior industrial electronic document specification languages. The existing industrial electronic document specification languages are sufficiently complex that small entities do not have the resources to master them. Accordingly, when small entities wish to interface with large entities there are several possibilities:    call a human customer service representative at the larger entity;    use a web browser to access the web site of the larger entity and enter data manually; or    hire a contractor skilled in the industrial electronic document specification language to assist in format conversion.This latter is generally the only option for suppliers to large industrial concerns, when the larger concerns have the market power to demand particular electronic formats from their vendors. The necessity of hiring a middleman makes it expensive to deal with larger concerns and in fact ultimately increases the cost of manufactured products.
New XML formats that preserve the structures of existing industrial electronic document specification languages (such as EDI) can be very useful for small entities. Such XML formats include XEDI as discussed in J. Ricker et al., “XML and EDI: Peaceful Co-Existence” XML Solutions, White Paper, XEDI (http://www.xedi.org).
The prior application Ser. No. 09/466,627 allowed for automatic retrieval of data from a relational database into an XML document using an annotated Document Type Definition (“DTD”), an annotated DTD being referred to as “DTDSA”. However, there was no guarantee that the resulting XML document would be usable by other entities, who might not have the same data dictionary or schemas as the holder of the relational database, or who might be working in industrial electronic document definition languages other than XML.
Moreover, a number of problems were uncovered in attempting to automatically deposit data from an XML document back into the relational database.